Meek

When Eli slipped a spark beneath the door of the unused outbuilding in Brazinka's compound, he smelled stale air and dust. A few shafts of light fell through the cobwebbed glass of the windows. Despite the dirt, he was impressed by the glass. In Rockbridge, he'd almost never seen proper windows.

The room itself was large, with a high ceiling crossed by rafters. It might've once been an audience chamber of some sort, or even a ballroom. Dusty sheets covered the furniture that had been pushed into the corner.

Beside him, Lady Brazinka unlocked the door. "I'm afraid it's a bit of a mess."

"Who isn't?" Eli said.

Her lips quivered. "This compound has been in my family for generations. My grandmother lost the bulk of our estate on ill-considered, ah ..."

"Investments," Elsavet interrupted.

"Mm," Brazinka said. "Investments. And we've been unable to repair our fortunes, or reputation for that matter, ever since. So the compound lay idle until I moved in last year."

"And now you've invested all your money in your assurances?" Eli asked, a little dubiously. "Paying for the Cygnets and such?"

"Which is very generous of you," Lara said, to soften his tone.

"Not so generous," Brazinka told her. "Money and reputation won't help me when a plague of angelbrood spreads across the valley. At that point, the only thing that might help is an army of mages under the command of the monarch."

"Then why isn't he doing the unifying?" Eli asked.

"He doesn't believe the threat. Not yet."

"Have you spoken to him?"

Brazinka shook her head. "I've never even met him. As I said, my family is not entirely respectable at the moment. I've passed along messages, in my official capacity, to no effect."

"Speaking of your official capacity," Elsavet murmured.

"Oh! Yes, I'm due at the office." Brazinka smiled to Eli and Lara. "Enjoy your training. I'll have the maids clean the room for you."

"That won't be necessary, m'lady," Elsavet said.

And that was how Eli ended up dusting and mopping the entire room using rag-wrapped sparks. Which he resented at first, but soon found valuable. He hadn't really known that he could wrap his sparks with scraps of cloth. And he couldn't see through the sparks covered in rags, so he needed to learn to judge their position with his eyes.

Then Elsavet had him close his eyes and feel them. Five points in space, drifting around him. Higher, lower. Touching the wall, scrubbing the floor. Flattening to get more surface area. Dunking into the bucket. Wringing a wet cloth between three sparks had been beyond him at first, but on the second day, he learned how to move them correctly.

Yeah, cleaning that room took him three full days. Which wasn't how he'd expected his training to proceed. Yet he learned more delicacy and control than he had in the previous month. And that delicacy and control translated into power, as well.

Elsavet watched how he used his sparks, taking note of the range and speed and deftness. She learned how they worked. Well, mostly. He only ever visibly used four sparks at a time, keeping the fifth one to himself--often tucked inside his shirt, so he couldn't cheat by looking through it. He couldn't quite shake the last trace of his paranoia.

Once the room was clean, Elsavet started teaching him meditation. Helping him descend into his core and trace his connection to this sparks. He spent two hours, three times a day, simply sitting with his power, cycling his consciousness from spark to spark to core to spark to core to spark to spark to spark.

Elsavet brushed him occasionally with her guidance, but didn't actually guide him, not yet. And when he wasn't meditating, he was sparring with her, or sometimes with Fishhook while Lara ran though her forms.

The first time he intercepted one of Mage Elsavet's glass beads with a spark felt like a triumph, even though the bead simply punched through his spark. At least he'd responded with speed and accuracy.

When his sparks grew stronger, he still couldn't block the beads outright, so he stopped trying. Instead, he flattened his sparks and caught the beads at an angle, deflecting them. That worked better ... though he still missed too many beads.

Which was why Lara found him lying on the floor of the training room, waiting for his pulped knee to knit back together.

"We're not doing enough to find the Killweeds," she told him in dryn.

"I'm fine," he said, gesturing to his blood-soaked trousers. "How're you?"

She answered in dryn, but he didn't understand, so he checked with his sparks then said, "Nobody's in earshot."

"I'm more bruised than you ever stay," she repeated in Iolian. "Fishhook is evil."

"You're enjoying it, huh?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Yeah. I don't ... yeah. I am."

"So how can we find the Killweeds? We're already lurking in a different tavern every night, eavesdropping. We've learned a lot."

"Nothing about Killweeds, though. We need to ask Lady Brazinka to help. She knows people."

"How do we explain that we know about them?"

"The Mother Glade."

"You think she'll believe that?"

"It's more believable than the truth," Lara said.

"Ha. True."

"And even if she doesn't believe us, she'll still help us."

"You think?"

"Yes I think. She's actually ... good."

"Yeah."

"If you stopped scowling at her, maybe you'd realize."

"I don't scowl."

"You scowl."

"I just don't trust her yet. Not completely."

"I'll tell her that we've been thinking about the Bloodwitch," Lara said. "That we're concerned other people like her exist. We don't want one of them to be getting stronger, all unnoticed by the throne."

"Not yet, Lara."

"Or we can ask Swan if she's heard any rumors. Between her tavern and her company, she gets all the gossip."

Eli flexed his knee, then winced. "Wouldn't the Order know about threats like that?"

"We can't talk to them. We don't know what they'd make of you. Probably nothing good."

"Oh, right. But Fishhook's close with them. Has he said anything?"

"Just that the Order determined the Bloodwitch isn't a lost mage. According to them, she's some kind of angelbrood who lingered past the concomi--concoti--the Three Moons."

"Concomitance." He thought for a moment. "I guess they're not wrong. She was born of the Celestials. But what're they going to do about it?"

"They think she's the only one. One of their tests is, lost mages rarely survive six months after leaving a Path. Anyone who survives more than a year, as far as they're concerned, isn't their problem. And Fishhook said the witch is trapped in the Weep, which is off-limits anyway."

"Oh."

"We need help, Meek. We can't do this alone."

"We'll talk to the lady," he said.

"Good, I'll--"

"In a few weeks."

"Deal!" Lara said, too quickly. "Now stand up, let's spar."

"My knee's still half-broken."

"I know! And don't use your sparks. That'll make it even."

Every night or two, Eli and Lara ate dinner with Lady Brazinka and Mage Elsavet. Commander Swan joined them as often as not. The mercenary leader usually brought a novel with her. She'd plead with Brazinka to read aloud after dinner over glasses of port, before Eli and Lara slunk into the city on their nightly tavern-crawl.

The stories were absolute tripe, but Eli couldn't help but enjoy the readings. Mostly because he liked watching Swan's face. She was a big, blunt-featured woman who in combat had all the subtlety of an avalanche. She swung a war-hammer with wild abandon, and apparently often paired herself with Twoeyes for defense. She managed the Cygnets cannily, though, with a combination of generosity and roughness. She'd been raised in the company, and she'd ridden with them for fifteen years, so command came easily to her.

At Lady Brazinka's dinners, she dressed in too-frilly frocks. She looked like a war-horse with ribbons in its mane. Except ... shy. She remained almost completely silent at the table, and didn't come to life until Brazinka started reading. Then her expression became rapt and dreamy. She was an unabashed romantic, and Eli found that utterly charming.

Also, he liked how Brazinka read. The novels were trite, but she projected real feeling into them: anguish, regret, adoration, love. He wondered if Stillness seeped out of her as she acted out the parts, because sitting in the parlor with the fire crackling, watching her declaim some idiot's passion for the duke's prodigal daughter, or whatever, gave him real pleasure. And made him remember that there was more to life than running and fighting, hiding and fighting and running again.

There was also 'sitting in a comfortable chair and drinking port while listening to earnest nonsense, well-delivered.'

After a tenday, he started to wonder if Swan was in love with Lady Brazinka. At about the same time, he started to wonder if a wound was healing inside him. One that had taken far longer to mend than a physical injury. One that had cut him far more deeply than any physical wound. He'd started to feel less ... raw. Less unbalanced.

On a night that Swan didn't join them, Lara asked Brazinka about her day. About her official duties, her attempts to secure payments that were long overdue.

"Overdue by centuries," Lara said. "How can the debts remain if everyone who agreed to them is already dead?"

"Treaties outlive us all," Brazinka told her. "And that's half of the trouble. I need to pinpoint the exact people or group that, to put it simply, inherited the treaty's obligations."

"That doesn't sound like half the trouble to me," Eli said.

"Well, true. It's only a small fraction of the trouble. The rest is convincing them to pay."

"Why did you go to Rockbridge, first? Why not start smaller?"

Brazinka set her fork aside. "I did. We secured three payments before Rockbridge."

"Oh. Huh. How?"

"By facing a weak organization with an entire mercenary company. Apparently if debtors are outnumbered, they don't question the veracity of the documents."

"Veracity?" Eli asked, because he liked to pretend he missed the occasional word.

"Truth."

He thought about that. "Do you care about the truth of the documents?"

"Meek," Lara said, telling him not to be rude.

"No, it's a fair question," Brazinka said. "Because I don't care. I'd happily pass false documents if I thought it would work. If I thought that would protect the valley. But I expect it would simply weaken my position, in the end."

"So you're stuck with veracity," Eli said.

She smiled. "Wwhat I'm mostly stuck with is urgency. And a sense of impending doom."

"The angelbrood is getting worse?" Lara asked.

"More frequent and more fearsome," she said. "Though so incrementally that it's hardly noticeable without records."

"You have records?" Eli asked, the scribe in him suddenly interested.

"I've seen them. The most frightening thing isn't even the number or frequency of outbreaks, it's the ... the intensity. Well, they're more widespread, and ... you know they've tended to stay away from shrines and populations centers?"

"Yes," Lara said.

"That's no longer as true."

"They'll form inside a town?" Eli asked.

"And a city. It's only happened six times in recorded history--but all six times have been in the past twenty years."

"I--we never heard that," Eli said.

"You wouldn't, in the Glade. Even the capital, it's a closely-held secret."

She fell silent when one of the maids served dessert. Eli ate a spoonful of sweet cream pudding, then frowned at Brazinka.

"When's the next one going to happen?" he asked.

"We've tried to predict concomitances for centuries. But the rising and setting of the moons follow no pattern that anyone's been able to discern."

"We met a man who tried to calculate them by the persimmon harvest," Lara said, teasing Eli.

"That's as good a way as any."

"You don't need to calculate them," Eli reminded Brazinka. "You can just ask your Stillness."

"I've tried. Believe me, I've tried, but my assurances don't give specific dates. Just a feeling of dread. The brood are coming faster, and most powerfully. They're bigger and stronger than ever before. And soon, they'll strike in the middle of our cities. If we're not ready for them, they will turn this valley into a mass grave."